The recent exhibitions dedicated to Botticelli around the world show, more than ever, the significant and continued debate about the artist. Botticelli Past and Present engages with this debate. The book comprises four thematic parts, spanning four centuries of Botticelli’s artistic fame and reception from the fifteenth century. Each part comprises a number of essays and includes a short introduction which positions them within the wider scholarly literature on Botticelli. The parts are organised chronologically beginning with discussion of the artist and his working practice in his own time, moving onto the progressive rediscovery of his work from the late eighteenth to the turn of the twentieth century, through to his enduring impact on contemporary art and design. Expertly written by researchers and eminent art historians and richly illustrated throughout, the broad range of essays in this book make a valuable contribution to Botticelli studies.

Ana Debenedetti is an art historian specializing in Florentine art, artistic literature and workshop practice in the Renaissance. She is Curator of Paintings at the Victoria and Albert Museum, responsible for the collections of paintings, drawings, watercolours and miniatures. She has written and published on Renaissance art, philosophy and poetry and holds a PhD in History of Art focusing on the artistic and cultural milieu of Quattrocento Florence, the interaction between philosophy and artistic literature through the work of Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499). She co-curated the exhibition Constable: The Making of a Master (V&A, 2014-2015) and Botticelli reimagined (V&A, 2016), and was co-author of the accompanying catalogue. Current projects include a display and a catalogue of French Master drawings in the V&A, and a book on Botticelli (Reaktion books).

Caroline Elam is a Senior Research Fellow at the Warburg Institute, University of London. She specialises in architecture, art and patronage in the Italian Renaissance and in the reception of early Italian art in the late nineteenth and twentieth century. She has held academic positions at the University of Glasgow, King’s College, Cambridge and Westfield College, University of London.

Introduction
Ana Debenedetti, Victoria and Albert Museum

Part 1: Botticelli in his own time
IntroductionMichelle O’Malley, Warburg Institute 1. Sandro Botticelli and the birth of modern portraiture
Patrizia Zambrano, Università degli Studi del Piemonte
Orientale2. Botticelli’s Portrait of a Lady known as Smeralda Bandinelli:
a technical studyNicola Costaras, Victoria and Albert Museum and
Clare Richardson, Courtauld Institute3. Classicism and invention: Botticelli’s mythologies in our time
and their time
Paul Holberton, independent scholar4. Jacopo del Sellaio’s adaptation of the Primavera Jerzy Miziołek, Museum of the University of Warsaw Part 2: The Botticelli effect
Introduction
Julius Bryant, Victoria and Albert Museum5. Whigs and primitives: Dante and Botticelli in England from
Jonathan Richardson to John FlaxmanMark Evans, Victoria and Albert Museum6. Befriending Botticelli: psychology and connoisseurship at
the fin de siècleFrancesco Ventrella, University of Sussex7. A woman’s touch, Michael Field, Botticelli and queer desireAnna Gruetzner Robins, University of Reading